


The Wrong Child

by ouroboros



Category: DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, M/M, Masturbation, One-Sided Relationship, Pining, Suicidal Thoughts, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 17:11:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3217061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ouroboros/pseuds/ouroboros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>When his own pain got to be too much, he would think about Aoba, and he'd stretch himself just a little further, reaching for that feeling. When he found it, and found Aoba, he would feel, for a moment, like it was real.</i> </p><p>Or, how Sei first discovered Aoba existed, and what that knowledge does to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wrong Child

**Author's Note:**

> I just have a lot of feelings about how Sei may have learned that Aoba exists, and how he could have imprinted on him in certain ways as he grew up.
> 
> ;__;

Sei was young the first time he felt Aoba. Thinking back, he wasn’t sure how young he’d been. Time was always sort of a blur, measured by birthdays that were celebrated the same way, with the toys he got as presents gathering into untouched piles beside his bed. He could never exactly place it in his mental timeline, but he figured he must have been about ten. That was around when he started being able to control his abilities a little better.

As misplaced in history as it was, he remembered the moment itself so clearly. He’d been brushing his hair. He liked doing that- it felt weird and a little painful, pulling at parts of him he wasn’t sure of the roots of, but not in a bad way. It calmed him. He was sitting at the vanity in his room, twirling slowly side to side in the high-backed stool, his skirt swishing at his knees, watching himself in the mirror as he brushed. It happened when he made eye contact with his reflection.

He felt him.

It had been a sort of throb. A tiny, personal earthquake, the epicenter pinpointed behind his eyes, shaking down his spine and out through his fingers as they released their hold. The ivory handle of the hairbrush cracked as it hit the floor.

Sei felt him before he even knew who he was. And it hurt.

He was no stranger to pain. As far back as he could remember there had been scalpels and wires and the dry, papery rustle of hospital gowns against his skin. This, though, had been different. It wasn’t the sting of a needle, or the anxious pressure in his wrists as they were bound to the operating table. It was a deep, resonating ache that crawled up through him and out his mouth, his voice a strangled gasp.

“ _Aoba.”_

He wasn’t sure what the word meant, at first, just that it was something huge, and his, and very far away. And then, all of a sudden, his consciousness was flooded with flashes of memories that weren’t his own. Most of them left his mind as soon as they entered it- he’d been too overwhelmed to filter it all properly at first. There was one thing he’d clung to, though, in the swirl of light and warmth and color: He was swinging high on a swingset, so high that his body left the seat for one exhilarating second before thudding back down into it during his descent, only to swing back upward and do it again.

He’d never done that. But he could feel, somehow, the sharp chill of wind against his cheeks, and the sting of his hair, bright and blue, whipping across his face as he swung.

He remembered his body feeling heavy then, his eyelids the heaviest of all, and the feeling of sliding into nothingness.

When he had opened his eyes again, he remembered. He wasn’t on his stool any longer. He was on his hospital bed again. Toue’s doctors were blurry shapes above him, and he struggled to focus, committing the feeling to memory. The word came back to him, and he clenched his teeth against it, not daring to speak it out loud again. Not where he was now. _Aoba. Aoba. Aoba._

He remembered his fingers tightening against the sheets, and his forehead straining against its strap, the word echoing in his brain over and over again before the sweet drip of his IV faded everything to black.

~~~~~

He kept the word locked up inside of his heart after that, afraid of what they would do if they found it. He had the sense memory of forming the word (which he knew, now, was a name) with his lips during days of fever, when he didn't remember much of anything. He recalled the fuzzy shapes of two men, their voices low and calm, but their strange blond selves outlined in a hard tension he didn’t trust. He hoped they hadn’t heard.

~~~~~

And so he grew, a bit. He got older, anyway. He was still small, his body weak and undefined. But years passed and the image of the bright blue boy, and of the sweet freedom of the lift he felt as his body had left the swing, stayed in his head.

His brain pushed against its own barriers, stretching farther every day. Slowly, he became able to hold onto the feeling of Aoba for longer periods of time. He could feel him, the softness of Aoba’s cheek as he rubbed it upon waking, the warm and foreign feeling of bodily contact from the pink haired woman, and from the allmate. He could feel the thrum of confidence and joy in Aoba’s whole body as he walked through the streets of a town where Sei had never been.

Sei followed him through all of it, aching for more. And when that joy shifted to the brokenness and anger in Aoba’s heart as he challenged more and more people to rhyme battles, Sei chased the feeling down. Those things Sei felt even stronger, since they happened inside himself. Inside parts of him he couldn’t control. Inside Usui, which was himself and not himself. He struggled to locate a personal nexus around which to settle his mind, but he couldn’t focus on one thing for very long.

It was all a swirl of sensation, of Aoba's life mixed with his own. It was the pain of the scalpel on his skin, of the pulse of blood flooding Aoba's mouth at a punch to his face in Rhyme just before he obliterated the mind and body of his opponent. Sei felt the sharp _shinnnk_ of scissors against his own hair, leaving it blunt and hurting, and also the comfort of blue fur cuddled up against Aoba at night as he slept.

When his own pain got to be too much, he would think about Aoba, and he'd stretch himself just a little further, reaching for that feeling. When he found it, and found Aoba, he would feel, for a moment, like it was real. He was aware of the fact that his sense of self felt more and more fractured every time he did this, but he pushed that thought away, because he needed it. Aoba had become the one thing that Toue couldn’t touch. The one thing that was his.

He wasn’t sure, really, what it was supposed to feel like to be alive. He knew what he had wasn’t it, but in the quiet of night, when he was curled up in his bed, pink blankets pulled up over his head, a splinter of his mind would follow its well-worn synaptic path to Aoba, and then, finally, Sei could get to sleep.

And so it felt natural, really, the first time he caught Aoba sliding his hand under the waistband of his jeans, for Sei to eavesdrop on the sensation.

He hadn’t thought to do this himself before. His body was not something he had realized could be pleasurable. It was, for as long as he’d been alive, a thing that belonged to other people. The more the doctors pressed bruises into his skin with their latex-covered fingers, the more he tried to distance his mind from what was happening. By now, when Virus and Trip (who were, at this point, a near-constant presence) would try to dress him in whatever awful thing they wanted him to wear next, he knew how to shut his brain off so it felt like it was someone else’s arm being limply shoved into a lacy sleeve.

But now, as the image of Aoba’s hand wrapped around his cock played on a loop in Sei’s mind, his body felt like it was waking up. His breath shuddered in his chest, and his heartbeat quickened until it matched the rushed pace of Aoba's. Sei's fingers ran along his own stomach, and it felt good. When he tucked a hand experimentally inside the elastic of his tights, it felt _amazing_. Sei came when Aoba did, both their chins tilted upward in pleasure, both sets of toes curled into their sheets.

~~~~~

Once he unlocked this in himself, he couldn’t stop. Aoba had given him something to care about, when he’d never had that before. As more time passed, the more he learned about Aoba, and his connection to him. Sei’s heart strained against his chest, wanting to be there, and to hold him. It hurt that he couldn’t, which made him all the more grateful for Ren, who could, even as an allmate.

Sei had learned enough about the world now to know what sex was. It wasn’t normally something he would have concerned himself with, but somehow, as he searched for something normal and warm, he’d found Aoba. And with him, he’d found this--the trembling sensation that took him over whenever his mind could find the strength to push for it. He would lay in bed--at night, at midday, time was mostly irrelevant--and imagine elaborate, flowing scenarios in which Aoba took him away from this place, of Aoba’s hands on him, at his hips, his throat, his cock.

Those fantasies worked to dull the ache of his bedridden days, but finding Aoba’s consciousness was much more rewarding. Each time Sei let himself splinter off once more to find him, he knew he was weakening himself. He knew that there were only so many times he’d be able to manage this before he shattered completely, but he did it anyway, because the pull in his chest and the throb in his cock were too much to ignore.

~~~~~

And so, one night found him like every other, sitting on his stool, getting ready for bed. He wasn’t any sleepier than usual, but it was late, probably, so he brushed his hair, relishing in the stinging pull of the brush against the strands. It was a soothing pain, because he was giving it to himself, unlike the forced sensations of the day, where the needles and mental daggers were all forced on him by someone else. It was nice, almost soothing in a way, to be the one causing himself to wince. He finished brushing and tugged his skirt down over his bony knees and pulled his shirt over his head, sucking in through his teeth as even that simple movement overtaxed his shoulderblades. Those chores done, he lay down in his bed.

He wasn’t sleepy, but he was tired. Tired of every movement feeling like the air was full of knives, and his skin paper-thin and ready to be rent. He curled in on himself in his bed, pulling his knees up to his chest, gathering whatever warmth was left in his body. His hand snuck slowly down below the waistband of his leggings, looser than before against the thin line of his hips. He wasn’t even particularly turned on, but he was used to this routine, by now. What he really wanted was to sleep, but he knew that sleep was hard to come by, and that this nightly ritual helped him drift off.

He ran his long, thin fingers up and down his cock slowly as his mind followed its path to where Aoba lay, over the walls of Platinum Jail. Sei saw him, already asleep. It had occurred to him that by some codes of morality this would be unacceptable, but those codes were not his own. By this point, his concept of what it was like to be anything was so tangled up in Aoba, that the idea of extricating himself from him was unthinkable.

Aoba sighed and Sei’s grip on his cock tightened. He thought for a moment that Aoba would wake, but he just smiled, and settled. Sei squeezed his eyes against the terrible longing pounding in his head.

_Come find me, come find me, come find me._

He tried to make his thoughts a spear as his hand moved quickly between his thighs. He wanted to push them from his brain and into Aoba’s, trying to get him to feel it, too, but nothing happened, as usual. The Aoba he pictured lay sleeping calmly-- so innocent, so beautiful, his hair falling sweetly across his pillow, not roused at all by Sei’s mental begging.

Aoba turned in his sleep, exposing a white expanse of neck, and Sei wondered for the thousandth time what it would be like to bite into him, there. His hand on his cock shuddered, shaking as he came, spilling onto his knuckles.

His arm hurt from moving, and his lungs were tight. He struggled to guide his breath back to normal, and when he had, finally, he pulled his leggings back up over his hips and stumbled over to the sink to wash his trembling hands. He wiped a tear away from the corner of his eye with the pad of his thumb. He tried to move to walk back to his bed, but his legs were weak, and he couldn’t seem to stop the cold shocks running down his back. His knuckles were white against the sink as he tried to gather himself. He looked up at himself in the mirror. The dark fall of his hair was soft in front of his eyes. He would have thought he was pretty, once, but now he just looked tired, and pale, and sad. He looked his reflection in the eye, and lifted his chin proudly. He smoothed his hair, tucking it behind his ear. He smiled thinly at himself, because after everything, it wasn’t hate he felt for his weaknesses. Only fatigue.

He changed his mind then, and turned not toward the bed, but to his computer.

He steeled himself, and walked to sit down in front of it. The lines of code formed in his mind before he even had a chance to input them. He pictured the player character--strong and resolute, his hair bright and blue even in 8 bit format. He called on what was left of the desperation in his heart as he built the game, half with the fast flurry of his fingers on his keyboard, and half with the quick attachment of his mind to the machine. It didn’t take long.

When he was done, when the game was sent to Aoba’s phone, he didn’t wait up to see what happened. He stumbled to his bed and lay down, his thin legs tangled in the bright comforter. Before he closed his eyes, he pictured himself, a princess locked high in a tower, miles away from the knight who didn’t even know he existed. His shaky breathing evened out, and when sleep finally found him, he was smiling.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I will try to sing a happy song  
> I'll try and make a happy game to play  
> Come play with me I whispered to my new found friend  
> Tell me what it's like to go outside  
> I've never been  
> Tell me what it's like to just go outside  
> I've never been  
> And I never will  
> And I'm not supposed to be like this  
> I'm not supposed to be like this  
> But it's okay  
> -[The Wrong Child, by R.E.M.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJflQnMDTcs)


End file.
